Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Love is all around!

I couldn't love these kiddos more!! We had fun spreading the love for valentines day. We had math centers where we had to graph candy sweet hearts, add hearts to get to ten, represent numbers using heart representations, and roll and add games. For literacy centers, we practiced writing valentines sight word cards, beginning sounds hearts to match pictures, and putting the heart halves together to identify beginning sounds. 
After all our hard work was done, we shared our valentines and maybe a little (just a little bit of sweets;) 

Holiday celebration

We enjoyed decorating sugar cones as Christmas trees for a yummy snack the last week of the quarter.
We loved having families visit our classroom and celebrate with us. Thank you to everyone who took part and helped out whether in the classrooms or supplying materials. It turned out to be a great event!

Snowy days

It's been a snowy winter inside the classroom, as well! Here we are working on adding and decomposing ten using snow balls!! You'd never know how many snow days we've had based on their continued growth and progress! 

Friday, January 17, 2014

Reading buddies

Mrs. Darrows third graders came down to read Christmas stories to us and helped us make Christmas cards. I hope you enjoyed them:) The students worked so well together we decided we will continue to do reading buddies once a month next quarter. The kindergarteners were motivated to show them how well they can read and write too. This will be a great way for third graders to be leaders and the kindergarteners to have role models to encourage them to read!

Christmas themed centers

Literacy centers 
Top left; sight word game- pull an elf from the bag and say the sight word. Try to get as many elves as you can until someone pulls out the present they win the game!
Top right; nonsense word fluency. Trying to pronounce the words accurately and collect as many words as they can until someone pulls out a penguin from the deck. That student then has to start over. Bottom left; read a sentence, trace it, build it (cut out and arrange words in the correct order) and then independently write it. 
Bottom right; pull a card and write the beginning and ending sound of that word.

Math center 
Count the room involved finding the Christmas object pictures I put up all over the room and counting how many there were of each. 

Snow globes

We started doing narrative writing second quarter. The students used their imaginations to write about what they would do if they lived in a snow globe. They have shown so much progress with their writing skills this quarter. They are using spacing, appropriate capitalization, punctuation, and adding details. They are also referring to the word wall to correctly spell sight words, and stretching out words to write down the letter sounds they hear.

Parent volunteers

A huge thank you to the parent volunteers who came in to read with us for holiday week. The students loved hearing some of your favorite Christmas stories and doing a craft to bring home as Christmas presents.
Barry's mom read and made wreath ornaments with us.

Madelyn's mom read and helped us make snowman, reindeer, and Santa figures.

Zariah's Dad came in his police uniform to tell us about what he does and how he keeps people safe. He also read us "The Gingerbread boy" and then we decorated gingerbread men.